Nolan told her something he had never explained fully. After Anna died, the house had felt like evidence of his failure to save her, and every familiar room seemed to contain a question he could not answer. At work there were schedules, problems, and rules; if something went wrong, he could usually find the cause and fix it. He had accepted extra shifts partly because the warehouse gave him a place where grief could be converted into tasks.
"I thought if I made enough money, it would mean I was doing the right thing," he said. Tessa nodded slowly. "You were doing a lot of right things," she answered. "You just weren't the only person who needed taking care of."
They ate before the food cooled. The turkey was slightly dry at one end and the stuffing used more sage than either of them remembered, but neither complained. Tessa cut the pie, Nolan made coffee, and after a while they started telling stories about Anna that no longer seemed as dangerous to touch as they once had. They laughed about the year she dropped the cranberry sauce on the dog, and Tessa admitted she had always suspected her mother found the accident funnier than she admitted.
After dinner, they washed the dishes side by side. The radio played softly in the kitchen, and the window above the sink showed their reflections standing together. Tessa asked whether he had any plans for Friday. Nolan said the board wanted to hear from him, and that he was going because the company's decision had affected twenty other families as well as theirs.
"Are you going to ask for your job back?" she asked. Nolan shook his head. "I'm going to tell them what happened. After that, I have applications to send and people to call." Tessa dried a plate and put it into the cupboard where it had always belonged.
Before bed, she came downstairs carrying a small photo album. They sat on the couch and looked through pictures of Anna teaching Tessa to skate, Nolan holding a crooked birthday cake, and a Christmas morning when none of them had bothered changing out of pajamas before opening presents. Tessa stopped at one photograph of the three of them at the kitchen table and rested her thumb against the edge of the image.
"You know what she would say about all this?" Tessa asked. Nolan smiled faintly. "She'd tell me to stop acting like the warehouse invented Thanksgiving." Tessa laughed because that was exactly right, and for a moment they both felt Anna present in the warmth of the room without needing to imagine that she had returned.
Nolan slept better than he expected. He woke early Friday, not because an alarm demanded it, but because he was used to watching a clock before every important meeting. The sky outside was gray, and snow edged the driveway in uneven white lines. Tessa was already awake, making toast in the kitchen as though she had always lived there and never intended to leave.